Frustrating article -- I have several killer ideas (and ideas for decent execution paths for them as well,) but I tend to get pigeon-holed as "just an idea guy" and generally invalidated.. So I've tried to learn to program to execute them myself, but that's a slow, long process, I'm an excellent Project Manager but a B- programmer, plus trying to wear every hat in a company is not exactly fun. I've seen so much talen…
I think your skill is really valuable. I am the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm an engineer and I think a decent programmer and a creative guy but when it comes to generating business ideas I'm just dead as a zombie.
Idea Generation
71–80 of 146 posts
Re: Idea Generation
#72Re: Idea Generation
#73Graham crackers with chocolate pre applied for making s’mores.
A racing league for bipedal robots.
Re: Idea Generation
#74Re: Idea Generation
#75So what are some good ideas right now?
Could start by setting up some kind of IoT auditing system.
Re: Idea Generation
#76Here are some ideas but they don’t seem any good: Graham crackers with chocolate pre applied for making s’mores. A racing league for bipedal robots.
If we permit meatware it might be ok.
Re: Idea Generation
#77> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and…
I found that statement ambiguous as well. For a while I wondered if he meant to imply either of those cases can be a differentiator.
Re: Idea Generation
#78What you need is a goal and a vision for an improvement to something that people want. Take any current service, and try to figure out what metric people are really using to evaluate it.
Now think about what it would take to 10x that metric. I'm stressing the really because that's where you have to do some folk anthropology and try to understand what people really want.
If you think people eat food to maximize calories, providing them with 10x calories would sound like a good thing, but that's probably not what's happening. Maybe what you want to figure out is how to have 10x calories / dollar.
But people don't just eat food for calories, they also eat it for the nutrient mix. What would be the perfect nutrient mix? Does it need to be custom? Can it be done at a good cost? (that's kind of what Soylent has been doing)
Food is also one way we experience some of the most varied sensations: can you make something that's both incredibly nutritious, and that expands people's palates?
Food is also built around social experiences, how can you improve the social experience of cooking and eating together? What's the metric? What does 10x that metric look like?
Can you 10x along those 3 axes at the same time? Are there trade offs? Can you overcome them?
I'm just using food as it's an obvious need/want everyone recognizes (low on the Maslow pyramid).
But that can apply to literally anything, as long as you dig deep enough to figure out the underlying need/desire/want.
And that way you can quit trying to find random "ideas" based on trends that are just at the surface of things.
Jeff Bezos (and a bunch of other people) said it before: don't try to think of what's going to change, think about what's not going to change. People's desires are one of the most stable thing you can build on. Figure out that bit and you'll find a bottomless well of ideas.
Re: Idea Generation
#79> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and…
There's two competing lenses of thought that bookend your struggle: On one hand, Sam's point is basically described by Paul Graham's essay on "Narrow and Deep" ideas [1]. You want an idea to have a few passionate users rather than lots of lukewarm users, because there's an activation energy to building a habit and if you're only lukewarm you're not going to get over it. As PG put it, "Sum that reaction over a whole p…
I think that we lose a lot from a mentality that isn't adaptive, that prescribes in advance whether something is going to become popular or not. Because then something that is currently a niche gets killed off before it finds the mass market. I feel like whenever I find something new I like in the supermarket it disappears a short time later, presumably because of greedy optimization.
Re: Idea Generation
#80> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed ...coinbase was a 'no idea' startup